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Gallery shows Resident Artist

Two Coats Resident Artist: Stephanie McMahon, March 8-13, 2026

Contributed by Sharon Butler / This March I am delighted to welcome Stephanie McMahon to the Two Coats of Paint Residency Program. Stephanie lives and works in Alfred, New York, where she is a professor at SUNY Alfred and co-founder of the Alfred/Düsseldorf MFA in Painting and Residency Program. Up in Western New York, she is surrounded by an unruly and tangled 17+ acres of forests, fields, and ravines. While her rural environment has informed her paintings, it is the visual form of the twisting branches, leaf shapes, and shifting color that most fascinates her. Stephanie’s primary interest is the activity of painting itself.

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Gallery shows

Jeffrey Bishop and Mason Dowling: Worldly phantoms

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The lithely flirtatious and somewhat Boschian primary elements in Jeffrey Bishop’s acrylic-and-collage Sidewinder series of screenprint-painting-collages – now on display at McKenzie Fine Art – are centered, unabashed things-about-town, decidedly abstract but, in their verticality and jazzy affect, firmly digital-biomorphic.

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Solo Shows

Mitchell Kehe’s targeted irresolution

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The title of Mitchell Kehe’s solo show at 15 Orient – “Bonded by the Spirit of Doubt” – encapsulates the ambiguity and contradiction in which he traffics. Doubt is fundamentally divisive and isolating, a fraught source of any bond in the sense of affection or solidarity. Maybe he means “bonded” in the sense of “certified,” the way American whiskey is, uncertainty and doubt being such pervasive phenomena that no work of art can claim validity or integrity without somehow imparting them. In his beguiling paintings, this idea is manifested in a casual tension

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Conversation

Barbara Owen and Olivia Baldwin

On the occasion of “Slip,” Olivia Baldwin and Barbara Owen’s two-person exhibition at OVERLAP, an interesting artist-run space in Newport, RI, Two Coats of Paint invited the artists to contribute a conversation about their work. Each is engaged with personal history, found materials, and the emotional resonance of color. For both Baldwin and Owen, meaning emerges primarily through the process of making.

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Gallery shows Hudson Valley & Vicinity Gallery Guide

Hudson Valley (+ Vicinity) Selected Gallery Guide, February 2026

Contributed by Karlyn Benson / February’s highlights include the opening of Geary’s new location in Salisbury, Connecticut with a solo show of paintings by Alan Prazniak. On February 6, Souvenir, a group exhibition curated by Jeff Bailey opens at RUTHANN in Catskill. Numerous exhibitions are opening on February 7, including Terrestrial Extra at the Dorsky Museum, guest-curated by Alta Buden and Craig Monteith of Roundabouts Now. The same evening there are openings at Headstone (Above Board Ceramics), 68 Prince Street (Sharon Butler, Jason Travers, Kieran Kinsella, Murray Hochman, and Eileen Power), Distortion Society (Spaces Between Color) the Garrison Art Center (Stephanie Garmey and Michael Prettyman) and Buster Levi’s final show Open Ending….

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Solo Shows

Alex Kwartler: Open to the world

Contributed by Shirley Irons / In a dream, I asked Alex Kwartler if his work was about the unreliability of images. God no, he yelled. “Off-Peak,” his current show at Magenta Plains, presents modestly scaled paintings that read across the room like music, with beats and rests, highs and lows. Their subjects include tender representation, stark pop, painterly abstraction, tin can lids, dots, drains, and shipwrecks. They echo and repeat. Their consistency lies in his assured, skillful paint handling. When you can do anything with paint, why not just do it? 

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Solo Shows

Choong Sup Lim: Eastern ode to a Western city

Contributed by Ben Godward / Choong Sup Lim says that he doesn’t paint his sculptures but rather finds the color in the city. This might be the most important aspect of his show “Yard” (Madang) at Shin Gallery. Color as form – in this case, linen and detritus from the city – yields a pallet of neutrals. Linen, the substrate of painting with a capital P, takes a star turn here. Much of the show consists of raw linen, and it is as important in the sculptures as it is in the paintings. 

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Gallery Guides NYC Gallery Guide

NYC Selected Gallery Guide, February 2026

Contributed by Sharon Butler / It’s February and my head is already spinning. I saw a few shows yesterday and recommend a trip to 15 Orient on 72 Walker Street (enter on Cortlandt Alley) to see Mitchell Kehe’s show “Bonded by the Spirit of Doubt,” in which enigmatic composition seems to affirm and concretize the pit I feel in my stomach. If narrative is more your jam, stop by LUNCH, a pop-up space downstairs from NADA headquarters at 311 East Broadway. Bill Arning has curated a show called “Ambiguous Storytellers” featuring Hannah Barrett, Tyler Brandon, Ario Elami, Matthew Gilbert, T.J. Griffin, Paula Hayes, Brian Kenny, Phil Knoll, Steven Lack, Jean Paul Mallozzi, Daniel Morowitz, Donna Moylan, Rajab Ali Sayed, and Erik Daniel White. Don’t miss Hilary Harnischfeger’s “Song for Clouds,” the artist’s fifth exhibition at Uffner & Liu. She crafts handmade objects that uncannily reflect the geological processes of tectonic pressure, sediment layering, and mineral buildup. Two Coats fave Alex Kwartler returns to Magenta Plains with “Off-Peak,” a solo show in which he presents “an inventory of passing attentions” that perfectly capture this age of distraction.

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Gallery shows Group Shows

Lucas Blalock and Julia Rommel’s well-oiled machine

Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / Consider the hunk as a deliberate, usable form, as Julia Rommel does. Her paintings are hunks of color painted on linen – cut up, unstretched, and stapled into off-the-air color TV bars. They are as much about labor as color. Each painting feels as though it was sledgehammered into the wall just before you walked in the room, still ringing from the strike. Flanking Rommel through the show is Lucas Blalock, photographer. His photos operate similarly, offering an easy, even fun, seduction that segues into discovery as you find out how he’s tricked you. Images are cut and layered over one another, details are hidden. The viewer is rewarded for close, patient attention, as in an I Spy book. 

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Solo Shows

Hedda Sterne’s infinite space 

Contributed by Jason Andrew / Hedda Sterne was the only woman made famous by Nina Leen’s photograph The Irascibles for Life magazine in 1951, and the group’s last surviving member when she died at 100 in 2011. While many of those featured in that iconic photograph achieved mythic status, Sterne was consigned to the margins of art history. “I am known more for that darn photo, than for 80 years of work,” she once remarked. Implausibly inventive and unwilling to adhere to a single style nor embrace prevailing aesthetic trends, Sterne didn’t cast herself in the heroic mold favored by the brooding boys associated with Abstract Expressionism.

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Solo Shows

Anne Russinof: More than a gesture

Contributed by Michael Brennan / Anne Russinof passed away a year ago at the age of 68. “Gestural Symphony” is a commanding memorial retrospective of her mostly large, emphatically gestural paintings. Posthumous exhibitions are by nature bittersweet, but Russinof’s resists melancholy because her work is so irrepressibly lively. Her signature outsize curves are sweeping and springy. They kick, bounce, and jump around.

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